This website first appeared December 6, 2009

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Feel free to use the material on these pages.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Northwest Geology Field Trips, by Dave Tucker, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You can use what you find here, repost it with attribution to the author, "remix" it for your own purposes, but may not use it with the intent of making money off of it.

EDUCATORS: Please feel free to use anything you find here that is useful to your mission educating people about Earth science. E-mail me if it would help to have a larger or higher-resolution version of any of the images. tuckerd at geol dot wwu dot edu

This page directs readers to projects they can participate in, usually as volunteers with a minimum of geologic experience.

Projects will vary with time; some may be long-term lasting years or decades, others will be for a brief time – hours, days or weeks. Some projects will have their own websites or data archives, and links will be provided for these.

Typical NW Washington beach scene: erratics and admirers. Can you find the pug?

Two projects are listed. The first is the Glacial Erratic Inventory database maintained by students at the University of Washington’s GeoClub. Anyone can send in information and photos of ‘significant’ erratics, which the students will plot on a map. Send them photos and info and they’ll post that, too..

Golden sunlight and honeycomb weathering at Larrabee State Park, Washington. The photo is about 1 meter across.

The other will be a very long term (decades) effort to track changes in tafoni size and frequency in sandstone of the Chuckanut Formation. Tafoni (also known as ‘solution pockets’ or ‘rock honeycombs’) come and go over time. Specific sample sites will be listed, along with photos and measurement criteria – when this project is ready for your participation, you’ll receive a post if you are an email subscriber to this website. Examples of tafoni are included in the honeycomb weathering page on the Northwest Geology Field Trips website.

If you know of other ‘citizen geology’ projects, please let me know about them. Or design your own.

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4 Responses

Probably not the place to ask this, but was hoping someone could help. We recently hiked the Bean Creek Trail and found several rocks with a thin coating of what resembled melted green glss or jade. Was wondering if anyone knew what it was?

Yes, I concur with Barbara Matson’s idea. If the ‘green glass’ was on fracture surfaces, then slickensides caused by movement along faults. If the entire rock had that glossy green color, including the interior, then it is most likely serpentine.